For a tube simulation I am doing I am working with circular coordinates. I.e. a point on the wall of the tube could be defined by two parameters: the point along the centerline (spline) of the tube, and the angular coordinate given in the range [0,1].

Because the angular coordinate 1 describes a full rotation, 1 = 0; (because 360 degrees will give the same result as 0 degrees rotation)

This leads to a couple of issues if we want to calculate the difference between two angular coordinates, or the mean between two angular coordinates.

Here are some functions that I use to calculate the mathematically correct modulo of 1, the correct distance between angular coordinates and the correct mean between angular coordinates. I don’t pride myself on my math so If anyone has a better method please let me know

	/// Mathematically correct modulo 1. This is the same as MyMath.Mod(a, 1.0f);
	public static float Mod01(float a) {
	    return a - 1.0f * Mathf.Floor(a / 1.0f);
	}

	/// for numbers in the range [0,1] this will give the wraparound distance (i.e. (0,1) will give 0, (1,0.1) will give 0.1 etc.)
	public static float WraparoundDistance01(float a, float b) {
		float min = Mathf.Min (a,b);
		float max = Mathf.Max (a,b);

		float dist1 = max - min;
		float dist2 = Mod01(min-max);

		return Mathf.Min (dist1, dist2);		
	}

	/// for numbers in the range [0,1] this will give the circular or wraparound mean. (i.e. (0.8,0.2) will give 0 instead of the arithmetical mean of 0.5)
	public static float CircularAverage(float a, float b) {
		float small = Mathf.Min (a,b);
		float big = Mathf.Max (a,b);
		float distance = WraparoundDistance01(small,big);
		float diff = big - small;

		float average;
		if(diff > 0.5f) {
			average = Mod01(big+distance*0.5f);
		} else {			
			average = small + distance*0.5f;
		}
		return average;
	}